When we humans receive uncertain information, we interpret it properly, so we can expand the conversation, and take proper actions. This is possible because we have "commonsense" concerning the word, which is built up from knowledge that is stored through long time experience. Among the commonsense we use in our every day lives it is thought that there are the commonsense concerning; quantity such as size, weight, speed, time, or place; sense or feeling such as hot, beautiful, or loud; and moreover emotion such as happy or sad. In order for computers to understand the meaning and become closer to human beings, it is thought that the construction of a "Commonsense Judgment System" which deals with these "commonsense" is necessary.
A subsystem needed for the "Commonsense Judgment System" is the system that judges the commonsense concerning the characteristics of words, namely the "Commonsense Feeling Judgment System." This paper proposes a mechanism to associate the characteristics of a word based on our five senses, such as an apple is red, with a knowledge base consisting of basic words.
When aiming to realize this "Commonsense Feeling Judgment System" and trying to make a computer have the same commonsense and judgment ability as human beings, a very important factor is the handling of unknown words. Judgment concerning words, which are given to the computer as knowledge before hand, is not a problem since it can refer to that knowledge. But when an unknown word, non-registered knowledge, is inputted, how to process that word is a very difficult problem.
In this paper, a method of unknown word processing, which connects an inputted unknown word to a word that is registered in the judgment knowledge base, is proposed. By using a concept base, which is made from several electric dictionaries, the closeness of meaning is put into consideration. With this process, it is possible to understand a word that does not exist in the knowledge base. This study aims to retrieve the meaning concerning sense, and deepen semantic understanding.

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Argumentation is the most representative of intelligent activities of humans. Therefore, it is natural to think that it could have many implications for artificial intelligence and computer science as well. Specifically, argumentation may be considered a most primitive capability for interaction among computational agents.
In this paper we present an argumentation framework based on the four-valued paraconsistent logic. Tolerance and acceptance of inconsistency that this logic has as its logical feature allow for arguments on inconsistent knowledge bases with which we are often confronted. We introduce various concepts for argumentation, such as arguments, attack relations, argument justification, preferential criteria of arguments based on social norms, and so on, in a way proper to the four-valued paraconsistent logic. Then, we provide the fixpoint semantics and dialectical proof theory for our argumentation framework. We also give the proofs of the soundness and completeness.

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The importance of the WEB chat in discussion has been well known and used effectively in collaborative learning environment. In order to activate discussions, various functions such as identification of participants' roles, motivation to participate, and resolution of depressed discussions are needed. This research proposes the function to calculate the "values of favorable words' influence" on real time, which are estimated by member of participants' words and their transitive structures. In this paper, firstly we define the "values of favorable wards' influence" as an index for the active direction of discussion and the discussion model based on this index, secondly we introduce an architecture of the discussion supporting system based on this model and its performance and finally through some practical experiments we examine the validity and effectiveness of our discussion model.

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GUNGEN-DXII, a new version of the GUNGEN groupware, allows the users to process hundreds of qualitative data segments (phrases and sentences) and compose a coherent piece of text containing a number of emergent ideas. The idea generation process is guided by the KJ method, a leading idea generation technique in Japan. This paper describes functions of GUNGEN supporting three major sub-activities of idea generation, namely, brainstorming, idea clustering, and text composition, and also summarizes the results obtained from a few hundred trial sessions with the old and new GUNGEN systems in terms of some qualitative and quantitative measures.
The results show that the sessions with GUNGEN yield intermediate and final products at least as good as those from the original paper-and-pencil KJ method sessions, in addition to the advantages of the online system, such as distance collaboration and digital storage of the products. Moreover, results from the new GUNGEN-DXII raises hope for enabling the users to handle an extremely large number of qualitative data segments in the near future.

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This paper proposes a document skimming environment for surveying documents in our research. Although there are a lot of on-line documents on our surroundings, people, generally, prefer printing out on-line research papers from computer screen. For this reason, although skimming is used for reading documents in our daily life, it is difficult for us to skim documents from computer screens. Therefore, we developed a document skimming environment. The environment has a skimming support system and a recommendation system. The skimming support system supports skimming documents from computer screens by the interface, which is applied the Fisheye effect and the Overview+detail effect. Focus points of the Fisheye effect are the sentences selected by the original sentence extraction algorithm based on the value of standard distribution, and the Overview interface is displayed automatically the generated table of contents. The recommendation system generates personalized summaries by the collaborate filtering, which use users' log of the skimming support system. Furthermore, evaluation results show as follows; The value of F-measure of our sentence extraction algorithm is higher than it of the sentence extraction algorithm based on TF or Japanese lexical chaining method, the skimming support system is more effective method to skim documents from computer screen than paper, and the skimming support environment is more effective method to product research proposal documents than paper.

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Recently, some educational courses focusing on creativity, hereafter called ``creativity education'' has been conducted in engineering education. We believe that such creativity education is crucial not only in engineering education, but also in general education. In this study, we designed a learning environment that enables participants to experience some common creative activities, and evaluated its effectiveness in a university class. Our educational program consists of the following three phases: (1) introduction (the participants learned the basics of Mindstorms using the instructional manuscript, and subsequently constructed and modified a moving car with four wheels using Mindstorms), (2) creative activities (they produced creative playground equipment that can move using Mindstorms), and (3) self-reflective activities on the creative processes (they reflected on their creative processes and added the information to a diagram, and they discussed advantages and disadvantages while referring to the diagram). We evaluated the effectiveness of our educational program based on comparisons of the pre- and post-tests and the contents of the participants' discussions. In particular, we confirmed the following three learning activities: (1) the participants discussed their creative activities from various viewpoints, (2) they also discussed the viewpoints considered to be important for creative activities, and (3) they realized the importance of idea generation, idea embodiment, and collaboration in creative activities.

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In this paper, a system called Caretta that integrates personal and shared workspaces to support face-to-face collaboration is described. We use PDAs for individual users' personal workspaces that enable them to reflect on their own idea. A shared workspace has been implemented by using a multiple-input sensing board, which allows a group of users to simultaneously manipulate physical objects. In order to raise the level of awareness among users, we have used augmented reality technologies and created an immersive environment for the users' shared workspace. Users of Caretta can discuss and negotiate with each other in the shared workspace, while they individually examine their ideas in their own personal workspaces. Therefore, Caretta allows users to participate in group activities interchangeably and seamlessly by using both these workspaces. Caretta can be used for several types of group activities. In this paper, it is used for supporting a group of users in urban planning tasks by allowing the users to actually construct a town on the shared space and evaluate the town through computer simulations. User studies to evaluate Caretta were conducted. Usage logs of Caretta, video analyses, and comments from users proved that each user could utilize personal and shared space interchangeably at their own pace and without being hindered by other users.

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The dynamic constraint relaxation theory predicts crucial roles of the initial diversity and evaluation in creative problem-solving. We reported the experimental evidence supporting these predictions, using an insight problem. The experiments showed that the degrees of making different types of trials and the appropriate evaluation were closely related to individual differences in insight problem-solving, and that evaluation became more appropriate by making the problem-solving goal explicit. The review of the research in related fields showed that these experimental findings were in congruent with the evidence obtained from different types of creative activities.

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This paper describes our approach for the development of application systems for creative knowledge work, particularly for early stages of information design tasks. Being a cognitive tool serving as a means of externalization, an application system affects how the user is engaged in the creative process through its visual interaction design. Knowledge interaction design described in this paper is a framework where a set of application systems for different information design domains are developed based on an interaction model, which is designed for a particular model of a thinking process. We have developed two sets of application systems using the knowledge interaction design framework: one includes systems for linear information design, such as writing, movie-editing, and video-analysis; the other includes systems for network information design, such as file-system navigation and hypertext authoring. Our experience shows that the resulting systems encourage users to follow a certain cognitive path through graceful user experience.

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